25. See note 12 on this page on the “LA System.”
26. “If being in revolt against a corrupt society constitutes being immature, then Philip Marlowe is extremely immature” (Chandler, 1951).
27. In allowing Marlowe this leeway, Ohls shows respect for his former colleague’s professionalism. Marlowe will not usually receive such consideration in his dealings with law enforcement. In fact, the police will later be infuriated with him for withholding information, but Ohls respects the rules of the PI game. He understands that Marlowe has to walk a fine line between serving his client and obstructing justice.
28. LA Central Library lists more than forty newspapers operating in the LA area at the time. The leading candidate for Marlowe’s three would be William Randolph Hearst’s Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express, which at the time had the largest circulation of any evening paper west of the Mississippi. The Los Angeles Times, the area’s oldest surviving daily, was and is published in the morning.
HOWARD HAWKS’S STABLE OF SCREENWRITERS
Howard Hawks was looking for someone to help William Faulkner write the screenplay for his film version of The Big Sleep. Impressed with a novel called No Good from a Corpse, he told his secretary to call “this guy Brackett.” Hawks must have been surprised to find that Leigh Brackett was a woman. Corpse was her first novel, published in 1941.
Brackett later said, “I went into the studio the first day absolutely appalled. Here was William Faulkner…how was I going to work with him?” Faulkner made the collaboration quite simple. He suggested that they alternate sections. They retreated to separate offices and had no communication until the script was turned over to Hawks. During the filming, Humphrey Bogart came to rely on Brackett over the other writers. According to Hawks biographer Todd McCarthy, “Bogart went straight to Brackett, whom he nicknamed Butch, whenever he wanted any of his dialogue toughened up.”
Brackett was a prolific genre writer, publishing science fiction and hard-boiled novels and stories until her death in 1978. Her film credits include The Empire Strikes Back and several scripts for Hawks. In 1973 she returned to the work of Chandler, thoroughly reworking The Long Goodbye for Robert Altman’s stunning film.
Faulkner and Chandler (who was nominated for screenplay Oscars for Double Indemnity and The Blue Dahlia) shared a cynical attitude toward Hollywood. Faulkner is quoted as saying, “Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.” He is credited on six screenplays, five of them directed by Howard Hawks, including the first Bogart-Bacall film, To Have and Have Not (1944). The great literary modernist finished his work on TBS on a train returning home to Oxford, Mississippi, in 1944. He mailed revisions along with a note that read, “The following rewritten and additional scenes for THE BIG SLEEP were done by the author in respectful joy and happy admiration after he had gone off salary and while on his way back to Mississippi.”
There was another principal screenwriter, besides Hawks himself: Jules Furthman, who had writing credits dating back to 1915. He worked with Faulkner on To Have and Have Not, was nominated for an Academy Award for Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), and wrote the 1947 film noir masterpiece Nightmare Alley, based on William Lindsay Gresham’s classic novel. Brackett and Furthman worked together again on the 1959 Hawks Western Rio Bravo.
Intriguingly, in a later interview Hawks credited another contributor to the script: a six-foot-two showgirl he said he was having a fling with called “Stuttering Sam,” after a character in John Ford’s Wagon Master. “I’d let her read The Big Sleep and she’d give me an idea for something,” Hawks later said. He may have been embellishing, but it makes for a good story. “She did some beautiful dialogue” for To Have and Have Not, Hawks averred.
TWELVE
The trees on the upper side of Laverne Terrace had fresh green leaves after the rain. In the cool afternoon sunlight I could see the steep drop of the hill and the flight of steps down which the killer had run after his three shots in the darkness. Two small houses fronted on the street below. They might or might not have heard the shots.
There was no activity in front of Geiger’s house or anywhere along the block. The box hedge looked green and peaceful and the shingles on the roof were still damp. I drove past slowly, gnawing at an idea. I hadn’t looked in the garage the night before. Once Geiger’s body slipped away I hadn’t really wanted to find it. It would force my hand.1 But dragging him to the garage, to his own car and driving that off into one of the hundred odd lonely canyons around Los Angeles2 would be a good way to dispose of him for days or even for weeks. That supposed two things: a key to his car and two in the party. It would narrow the sector of search quite a lot, especially as I had had his personal keys in my pocket when it happened.
I didn’t get a chance to look at the garage. The doors were shut and padlocked and something moved behind the hedge as I drew level. A woman in a green and white check coat and a small button of a hat on soft blond hair stepped out of the maze and stood looking wild-eyed at my car, as if she hadn’t heard it come up the hill. Then she turned swiftly and dodged back out of sight. It was Carmen Sternwood, of course.
I went on up the street and parked and walked back. In the daylight it seemed an exposed and dangerous thing to do. I went in through the hedge. She stood there straight and silent against the locked front door. One hand went slowly up to her teeth and her teeth bit at her funny thumb. There were purple smears under her eyes and her face was gnawed white by nerves.
She half smiled at me. She said: “Hello,” in a thin, brittle voice. “Wha—what—?” That tailed off and she went back to the thumb.
“Remember me?” I said. “Doghouse Reilly, the man that grew too tall. Remember?”
She nodded and a quick jerky smile played across her face.
“Let’s go in,” I said. “I’ve got a key. Swell, huh?”
“Wha—wha—?”
I pushed her to one side and put the key in the door and opened it and pushed her in through it. I shut the door again and stood there sniffing. The place was horrible by daylight. The Chinese junk on the walls, the rug, the fussy lamps, the teakwood stuff, the sticky riot of colors, the totem pole, the flagon of ether and laudanum—all this in the daytime had a stealthy nastiness, like a fag party.3
The girl and I stood looking at each other. She tried to keep a cute little smile on her face but her face was too tired to be bothered. It kept going blank on her. The smile would wash off like water off sand and her pale skin had a harsh granular texture under the stunned and stupid blankness of her eyes. A whitish tongue licked at the corners of her mouth. A pretty, spoiled and not very bright little girl who had gone very, very wrong, and nobody was doing anything about it. To hell with the rich. They made me sick.4 I rolled a cigarette in my fingers and pushed some books out of the way and sat on the end of the black desk. I lit my cigarette, puffed a plume of smoke and watched the thumb and tooth act for a while in silence. Carmen stood in front of me, like a bad girl in the principal’s office.
“What are you doing here?” I asked her finally.
She picked at the cloth of her coat and didn’t answer.
“How much do you remember of last night?”
She answered that—with a foxy glitter rising at the back of her eyes. “Remember what? I was sick last night. I was home.” Her voice was a cautious throaty sound that just reached my ears.
“Like hell you were.”
Her eyes flicked up and down very swiftly.
“Before you went home,” I said. “Before I took you home. Here. In that chair”—I pointed to it—“on that orange shawl. You remember all right.”
A slow flush crept up her throat. That was something. She could blush. A glint of white showed under the clogged gray irises. She chewed hard on her thumb.
“You—were the one?” she breathed.
“Me. How much of it stays wit
h you?”
She said vaguely: “Are you the police?”
“No. I’m a friend of your father’s.”
“You’re not the police?”
“No.”
She let out a thin sigh. “Wha—what do you want?”
“Who killed him?”
Her shoulders jerked, but nothing more moved in her face. “Who else—knows?”
“About Geiger? I don’t know. Not the police, or they’d be camping here. Maybe Joe Brody.”
It was a stab in the dark but it got a yelp out of her. “Joe Brody! Him!”
Then we were both silent. I dragged at my cigarette and she ate her thumb.
“Don’t get clever, for God’s sake,” I urged her. “This is a spot for a little old-fashioned simplicity. Did Brody kill him?”
“Kill who?”
“Oh, Christ,” I said.
She looked hurt. Her chin came down an inch. “Yes,” she said solemnly. “Joe did it.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” She shook her head, persuading herself that she didn’t know.5
“Seen much of him lately?”
Her hands went down and made small white knots. “Just once or twice. I hate him.”
“Then you know where he lives.”
“Yes.”
“And you don’t like him any more?”
“I hate him!”
“Then you’d like him for the spot.”6
A little blank again. I was going too fast for her. It was hard not to. “Are you willing to tell the police it was Joe Brody?” I probed.
Sudden panic flamed all over her face. “If I can kill the nude photo angle, of course,” I added soothingly.
She giggled. That gave me a nasty feeling. If she had screeched or wept or even nosedived to the floor in a dead faint, that would have been all right. She just giggled. It was suddenly a lot of fun. She had had her photo taken as Isis7 and somebody had swiped it and somebody had bumped Geiger off in front of her and she was drunker than a Legion convention,8 and it was suddenly a lot of nice clean fun. So she giggled. Very cute. The giggles got louder and ran around the corners of the room like rats behind the wainscoting. She started to go hysterical. I slid off the desk and stepped up close to her and gave her a smack on the side of the face.
“Just like last night,” I said. “We’re a scream together. Reilly and Sternwood, two stooges in search of a comedian.”
The giggles stopped dead, but she didn’t mind the slap any more than last night. Probably all her boy friends got around to slapping her sooner or later. I could understand how they might.9 I sat down on the end of the black desk again.
“Your name isn’t Reilly,” she said seriously. “It’s Philip Marlowe. You’re a private detective. Viv told me. She showed me your card.” She smoothed the cheek I had slapped. She smiled at me, as if I was nice to be with.
“Well, you do remember,” I said. “And you came back to look for that photo and you couldn’t get into the house. Didn’t you?”
Her chin ducked down and up. She worked the smile. I was having the eye put on me. I was being brought into camp. I was going to yell “Yippee!” in a minute and ask her to go to Yuma.10
“The photo’s gone,” I said. “I looked last night, before I took you home. Probably Brody took it with him. You’re not kidding me about Brody?”
She shook her head earnestly.
“It’s a pushover,” I said. “You don’t have to give it another thought. Don’t tell a soul you were here, last night or today. Not even Vivian. Just forget you were here. Leave it to Reilly.”
“Your name isn’t—” she began, and then stopped and shook her head vigorously in agreement with what I had said or with what she had just thought of. Her eyes became narrow and almost black and as shallow as enamel on a cafeteria tray. She had had an idea. “I have to go home now,” she said, as if we had been having a cup of tea.
“Sure.”
I didn’t move. She gave me another cute glance and went on towards the front door. She had her hand on the knob when we both heard a car coming. She looked at me with questions in her eyes. I shrugged. The car stopped, right in front of the house. Terror twisted her face. There were steps and the bell rang. Carmen stared back at me over her shoulder, her hand clutching the door knob, almost drooling with fear. The bell kept on ringing. Then the ringing stopped. A key tickled at the door and Carmen jumped away from it and stood frozen. The door swung open. A man stepped through it briskly and stopped dead, staring at us quietly, with complete composure.
1. Because the dead body would obligate him to go to the police, and Marlowe wants to conduct his investigation independently.
2. Scholar Mike Davis notes that Los Angeles has “the longest wild edge” of any major American city with the possible exception of Miami, bordering the Everglades (another great city for crime novelists). The Santa Monica Mountains taper into the Hollywood Hills, where Geiger and Sternwood live, and the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains to the east descend into Pasadena and the cities of what is now called the Inland Empire. Marlowe will wind up in the foothills of that area later in the novel.
Canyons of the Santa Monica Mountains
3. Queer was in the air in the Los Angeles of the Prohibition and post-Prohibition eras. The 1920s and early ’30s saw no fewer than ten new terms for “homosexual” recorded, including “fag” (ca. 1923) and, for that matter, “queer” (Auden used it in its current neutral/proud sense in a letter of 1932). Gay and lesbian subcultures were more visible than they had ever been before, thanks in large part to Prohibition speakeasies, where otherwise law-abiding Americans of all sexualities mingled and were often entertained over drinks by drag performers. The so-called Pansy Craze was all the rage in post-Prohibition New York (see note 6 on this page for “pansy”) and moved west in the early 1930s. At B.B.B.’s Cellar (where the floor show was called “Boys Will Be Girls”) and the Bali nightclub on the Sunset Strip, gay entertainers sang and danced for Hollywood celebrities. It was considered de rigueur to employ an obviously gay maitre d’, even at restaurants and clubs that were not considered “gay.” Flighty hotel clerks and swishy sidekicks, played by renowned queer actors like Franklin Pangborn and Edward Everett Horton, were featured in Hollywood films. Marlowe’s “fag party” reference may be to Hollywood parties, covered with a wink and a nod by the newspapers. All-male pool parties were hosted by, among others, Cole Porter and George Cukor; according to Irwin Winkler, director of De-Lovely, a 2004 film about Porter, they competed “to see who could have more boys by the pool.”
Marlowe takes a dim view of the festivities, here as elsewhere equating gender-bending behavior with sexual deviance and a general moral breakdown. In this he was not alone—the efflorescence of queer culture was quickly followed by a backlash well under way by the time this novel was written. LA anti-vice crusaders launched a major offensive against “sex perverts” in 1938, and the formation of a Sex Squad within the LAPD that same year was part of a general crackdown that increased throughout the 1940s and ’50s. A fascinating look at the period’s queer culture and its containment during and after the 1930s can be found in Daniel Hurewitz’s Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics (2007). See, too, Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons’s Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians (2006).
4. One might be tempted to reduce the potency of this comment to Marlowe’s reaction to the personal irresponsibility of the Sternwood family. More generally, we might consider it an expression of Depression-era economic cynicism and New Deal populism stemming from the “bloody thirties,” a “savage decade for labor” (in the words of historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.). But the roots of Marlowe’s damning comment lie even deeper, in the broader tradition of the American critique of wealth going back at least to Twain’s G
ilded Age. In 1904, Californian journalist Lincoln Steffens published an exposé entitled The Shame of the Cities. Steffens wrote that “politics is business. In America politics is an arm of business and the aim of business is to make money without care for the law, because politics, controlled by business, can change or buy the law. Politics is interested in profit, not municipal prosperity or civic pride. The spirit of graft and lawlessness is the American spirit.” Of course, the objection to such graft and lawlessness is another manifestation of the American spirit, and it pervades Chandler’s writing. As he put it in 1934, “The typical racketeer is only very slightly different from the business man in many of the more tricky kinds of business” he engages in. “I personally believe,” Chandler wrote fifteen years later, “and I am not a socialist or anything of the sort, that there is a basic fallacy about our financial system. It simply implies a fundamental cheat, a dishonest profit, a non-existent value.” Compare this exchange from The Long Goodbye:
GEORGE PETERS (Marlowe’s friend): That’s the difference between crime and business. For business you gotta have capital. Sometimes I think it’s the only difference.
MARLOWE: A properly cynical remark….But big time crime takes capital too.
PETERS: And where does it come from, chum? Not from guys that hold up liquor stores.
In 1956, the great American sociologist C. Wright Mills phrased it thus: “Behind every great fortune there lies a crime.” A pithy paraphrase of Balzac, this “properly cynical remark” would wind up as the epigraph of another great crime novel: Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (1969).
Incidentally, the formulation here and in Chapter Twenty-Five, when Marlowe spits, “Women made me sick,” rakishly echoes a favorite expression of Jake Barnes in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926): “Brett had a title too. Lady Ashley. To hell with Brett. To hell with you, Lady Ashley”; “Well, people were that way. To hell with people”; “To hell with women, anyway. To hell with you, Lady Ashley.” Chandler’s unpublished parody of Hemingway, entitled “Beer in the Sergeant Major’s Hat (or The Sun Also Sneezes),” repeats “The hell with it. She shouldn’t have done it” as a comic refrain. Here, however, Marlowe is being as serious as Hemingway’s Jake ever is.
The Annotated Big Sleep Page 17